Professor X's Correspondence Academy
by Lucillia
Summary: A fact about Magneto that shouldn't really be so shocking when one really stops to think about it comes to light. Charles takes the opportunity to twist the knife a bit, and to once again try to persuade his old friend turned enemy that he is on the wrong path. Unintended consequences naturally ensued.


The now old enough to collect Social Security had he paid into the system Magneto had been sitting in his plastic prison for over a month going increasingly mad with boredom, much as he had decades earlier when he'd been stuck in solitary for twelve years, when things got kicked off by a chance discovery.

It had all started with an agent quietly going "Holy Shit!" when he'd finally waded through the history of a certain prisoner which took up practically an entire filing cabinet. If one didn't include the warehouse full of boxes full of documents for the cases the man had been involved in that was. The whispers had spread from there. Everyone had _assumed._ Everyone had assumed that after the war, during the brief lull in which Eric Magnus Lensherr had actually started something resembling a life, that he had finished his education. And, because they had assumed, it had been incredibly shocking news to discover that the terrorist who had nearly brought the world to its knees through a plot to turn all of the foreign dignitaries visiting Ellis Island to deal with the mutant problem into mutants had only had four years of schooling. One year of schooling in Dusseldorf, and three in Poland. All at the Primary level.

At least on paper.

But, then again, such things as High School diplomas or their international equivalents had not been as important when Lensherr had been a young man. The first half of the Twentieth Century had still contained many, many stories of self-educated men who had never held a high school diploma, much less a degree, rising to positions of importance.

Still, word had gotten out, and people were less than pleased to discover that a man with a "Fourth Grade education" had managed to get himself implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy and later managed to stymie the government's best agents for decades after some idiot guard who'd worn the wrong shoes one day in 1975 had managed to walk into the Pentagon with metal aglets on his shoelaces while the metal detector outside of Magneto's cell was down.

Over a hundred good men dead because of four tiny pieces of cheap, easily bendable metal.

Experts were still trying to figure out how the hell "Magneto" had managed to pull that one off, especially considering the fact that he hadn't received any outside help. That, and they were currently lamenting the fact that they hadn't given the criminal things to do in order to "Improve his mind" during his decade plus incarceration, such as have him get his GED and maybe an advanced degree in Physics and another degree in Engineering so they didn't look like a bunch of frigging morons when certain facts had come to light...

After the initial screaming fury on the parts of the directors of several agencies - most especially the CIA - had died down a bit, orders which had been typed up by an exceedingly prudish secretary who'd been taking dictation were sent out instructing agents to "Get that f***er a diploma from a reputable source as fast as possible! No f***ing Diploma mills, the G*****n country's reputation is at stake! And, get it f***ing backdated it to as early as possible! Make it look like it got lost in the f***ing mail if you have to..."

Some wiseacre then took the orders as licence to contact Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Professor Charles Xavier, who was always happy to help the government provided that what he was being asked to do wasn't too unethical, agreed to register Magneto as a correspondence student who had started studying in the school's inaugural year and give Magneto a diploma which would be backdated to two years after the school opened. When the normally scrupulously honest Professor was asked why he'd go so far out of his normal character for his nemesis, the man grumbled something that sounded suspiciously like "He'd technically been a student of mine, so..."

The only condition the Professor had placed on this arrangement was that Magneto would take a test in order to confirm that the man was qualified to graduate from his school, because one thing he would not do would be to give a diploma to an unqualified student. Believing that Lensherr passing the test would be a given, the government agreed to this term in order to make this embarrassment go away before the general public got the idea that the Government could easily be outwitted by fourth graders and created more headaches for everyone when a bunch of idiots started acting on those beliefs.

Two weeks later, Magneto found himself sighing as he paged through the test that Charles had mailed him. He'd blown through the Reading, Writing, History and social Studies in near record time despite the fact that Charles had written down the questions in seven different languages. Only five of which he was fluent in, with the other two being languages he only had an intermediate grasp of. The Math had slowed him down a bit however. He'd only gotten up to about what was now about pre-Algebra back when he was the little smarty-pants in school, and he'd basically been forced to re-invent Algebra, Trigonometry, and Calculus during those twelve years of utter boredom during which he'd only had loose threads from his clothes and blankets that got hauled up through the food slot/makeshift shower each week to be washed to work with. While this had left him with the disadvantage of him being rather unfamiliar with the standard mathematical symbols beyond the ones he'd learned in school, his mathematical system had worked for him far better than the math he'd later tried learning out of books after his escape. That, and it had the added bonus of driving mathematicians and engineers, especially the ones analyzing his notes and the plans for his inventions, to fits as they tried to make heads or tails of "Magneto Math". The science was only slowed down by his less than standard mathematics. The concepts behind the basic High School Chemistry, Biology, and Physics were simple enough though.

It was the last two questions, a pair of essay questions that were apparently meant to engage thought and dialogue and display his "apparent lack of forward planning", that had given him pause.

The first question was thus: "You have succeeded in your war against the species Homo Sapiens Sapiens. You now have over six thousand-million bodies to dispose of. How will you dispose of them before insect and carrion animal infestations set in and diseases incubated in the rotting corpses and/or carried by the creatures that have come to feast upon the bodies spread to the approximately 3 million mutants left to populate the Earth spreading a plague that kills off the mutant population whose special adaptations do not allow for immunity to diseases?"

The second question was thus: "Considering the veritable army that is required to keep a single city running in a relatively sanitary manner (road repairs, proper flow of sewage, disposal of garbage, etc.), how would you keep society up and running at a level of technology and sanitation that is comparable to now, especially when mutants whose talents would be perfect for keeping things running may be disinclined to follow said career path? Bear in mind that any Homo Sapiens Sapiens slaves you keep will be likely to revolt at the first perceived opportunity."

"That was rather unsubtle of you Charles." Magneto said as he considered giving a rather flippant answer to the questions he'd been given. Charles Xavier had to be seriously slipping if he thought forcing him to think about the intricacies of actually running a society by mutants for mutants after a successful war against the Homo Sapiens would force him to reconsider the path he'd been on for nearly forty years...

 **Several Months Later, After the Events at Alkali Lake:**

"You've got to admit Charles, that raid on the school was entirely your fault" Magneto said over a connection whose location had been obscured using some old-school techniques that still actually worked, but wouldn't do so for much longer considering the near-inevitable forward progression of technology.

"How do you figure it was my fault?!" Charles asked in that tone that seemed to scream that Charles wasn't going to listen as he pointed out something that was right in front of Charles' face, which the man steadfastly refused to see.

"Stryker got ahold of that little test you gave me before you rather condescendingly sent over that diploma I don't need in order to appease the wounded sensibilities of those idiot Homo Sapiens who couldn't tell the difference between a lack of formal education and a lack of actual education. I've since been informed that he used the final two questions in order to gain support for the authorization of the attack on your school." Magneto said, knowing he'd scored a win on this one based on the tone of the silence on Charles' part following this statement.

After a few moments, Charles' silence changed to a "Blaming myself for everything" silence, and Magneto hung up. He wasn't in the mood to offer some barb that would provide his old friend some comfort by blaming him for this mess.

It wasn't like it was his fault. He'd just failed to graduate from Primary when he was a kid and Secondary when he was a spotty teenager thanks to that thrice-damned war and its aftermath where working in order to eat and put a roof over his head was more important than skipping off to school. That, and he'd never bothered to get a certificate that showed he had the knowledge equivalent to that of an American High School graduate or better until someone had finally forced the matter when he was around Seventy.

With one thing leading to another and one day quickly rushing into the next, it had just been easier to read anything and everything he thought he could use or anything that really, really, really caught his interest during his downtime rather than enroll in a school he hadn't really had any time to attend had he really wanted to what with his working to support a family, then hunting Shaw to hell and back, then establishing the Brotherhood, then Going off to Dallas...

 ** _Author's Note: Blame this on the fact that I'd been thinking, and realized that Magneto - Movie Magneto at least- would've been pulled out of any formal schooling he had very early due to the war, and likely never had time to finish school after WWII due to being either too busy hunting Shaw, etc. or too imprisoned in a cell with nothing but himself, his bedding, and the occasional meal tray for company..._**


End file.
